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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24076000">Louder than The World</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow'>anomieow</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>The Terror (TV 2018)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Afterlife, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hand Jobs, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Period-Typical Homophobia, Work In Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-08</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-11</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-02 20:40:21</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Explicit</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Major Character Death</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,734</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24076000</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/anomieow/pseuds/anomieow</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Harry and Henry reckon with the life behind and the life to come.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Henry Collins &amp; Harry D. S. Goodsir, Henry Collins/Harry D. S. Goodsir, Henry Collins/John Morfin</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>24</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Chapter 1</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Chapter 1 of 4 or 5.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“You’ve never been?”</p><p>“Not once.”</p><p>“Never <i>ever</i>?” Henry Collin’s eyes are wide with astonishment and it makes Harry Goodsir feel chastised, as though he has failed in some way.</p><p>“Not that I recall,”  he fumbles apologetically. “Perhaps when I was very small, but I can hardly imagine mother and father rustling about in briars—“</p><p>“You must go. We’ll go.” He grins broadly. “Today, now.”</p><p>“Now? But we’ve not finished breakfast, and you know I’m behind on my treatise. Desperately. And we’ve tea with—“</p><p>“Please?” Henry rests his heavy hand on Harry’s thigh, his thumb stroking inward. His smile doesn’t falter, but something arch and boyishly wicked has crept into it—a glint to the eye, a minute lifting of his brow. “You’ll be glad,” he promises.</p><p>Harry finally folds and sets aside the newspaper he’d lowered a few minutes before, when Henry had randomly asked if he’d ever been blackberrying. Now he studies the other man’s face carefully—dark, dancing eyes set beneath heavy, angular brows. Broad cheekbones tapering into thick muttonchops iced at the edges with silver. A delicate mouth, lips richly pink—always a little like he’s just been passionately kissed. And Harry is acutely aware that he’s being gazed at just as intently in return. He still hasn’t gotten used to that, to being seen as something valued, loved, vital. “Very well,” he says, breaking the almost unbearable eye contact—how naked he sometimes feels!—with a sip of tea. “What is needed?”</p><p>“You won’t regret it!” Henry says with a single clap of his hands. His joy overflows him, radiates. This is what first drew Harry to him, back at the beginning of the expedition: a grandness of spirit to suit the breadth of his shoulders, the prodigious span of his hands. A smile more candid and inviting than—Harry can think of nothing to compare it to: a doorway of light, a hymn made manifest.</p><p>But he had witnessed, too, the terrible dwindling of that spirit over the expedition’s worst days, seen the brightness in him twisted down into an agitated melancholy, which in turn became the helpless haze of perpetual intoxication in the last of it. A false warmth. This was after they’d left the ship and were camped on the frigid shale. He recalls Henry’s hysterical, hollow laughter as he reeled into camp the day of the hanging, returning from who knows where with Tuunbaq on his heels. He’d danced a careening path  between the bodies of Cornelius Hickey and Solomon Tozer, which hung as heavy and inert as plucked geese in a butcher’s storefront window.</p><p>But enough of that. Why should he think of that now, now that the man he loves, he of the over-bounding spirit, the heartbeat louder than the world, has been recovered and returned to him, and is with the vitality of a youth half his age bounding ahead of him on the path, looking for blackberries? </p><p>“Here,” Henry calls back to him, ducking down a tamped-down riff in the foliage. You wouldn’t even call it a path. Harry follows and finds himself in a small glen, girded two-thirds the way around with blackberry plants twining up the trees and spilling over into the grass, both higher and deeper than either man is tall. The berries glitter and you can smell them in the heat, a faint punchy tartness. Henry is already plucking them off the vine and popping them into his mouth. </p><p>“They’re perfect,” he says. “We could make jam! Though I’m not sure how. Do you know?”</p><p>Harry shakes his head. “There are recipes,” he says. “In books. Though I imagine a quick compote might be less ambitious—one would simply boil them down with sugar, and—“ </p><p>He’s cut off by Henry’s sudden proximity. He’s crossed the glen with three long strides and stands now so close Harry can feel his breath in his hair, on his brow. He inhales the smell of soap and new sweat, as well as a tarry sweetness on his breath and fingers. He’s holding up to he Harry’s lips a particularly fat blackberry. “Here,” he says. “Taste.”</p><p>Does Harry imagine a certain huskiness to his voice, a gleam of want already in his eyes? Harry closes his lips around the offered fruit and his lover’s fingers too, adroitly flicking the point of his tongue across the tip of each finger. This time he does not let himself look away, and is rewarded by a telltale hitch in Henry’s breath as his own tongue darts out swiftly to wet his lips. </p><p>“Perfect,” Harry says faintly. And it is. He’s had blackberries before, but they’ve never quite tasted like this: darkly sweet, tart at its core. “Absolutely perfect.”</p><p>Henry grabs his hand and leads him over to the bank of briars. “Pick some,” he says. “Watch for thorns.”</p><p>“Which ones shall I pick? They don’t all appear to be ripe.” In color, they range from a warm, pale pink to inky black, and every color between—rose red, oxblood, madeira. </p><p>“You’ll want the shiny black ones,” Henry explains. “Give it a small tug—it should come right off.” </p><p>“Surely not after just one tug?” Harry rejoinders.</p><p>“It happens to the best of us,” Henry returns laughingly as he strokes Harry’s hand with his thumb. “Now, just—pick one. You poor deprived man.”</p><p>“I <i>did</i> pick apples once.”</p><p>“Apples are fine, I s’pose. But berry picking is different. Better. ‘Specially blackberries. How they grow everywhere, all covered in thorns and asking nobody’s pardon.”</p><p>“They’re cousin to the rose, I believe.”</p><p>“‘‘Twas a rose thorn crippled my gran’s hand, did I ever tell you that? It drove into her finger just there—“ he holds up his hand and points to the crook of his opposite forefinger. “At the bend. And she couldn’t dig it out. Slowly one finger curved in, then the next—then the whole hand. She couldn’t grasp nothing, nor feel much.” He’s silent for a moment, thoughtful. </p><p>Idly, Harry reaches for a berry and it pops loose in his fingers. Effortless. Yet he is inexplicably proud. His eyes shining, he offers it to Henry, who clasps him gently by the wrist and lifts his fingers and thumb to his lips. Slips them into the close, sweltering cave of his mouth. He meets Harry’s gaze as he presses the tender fruit against his fingers with his tongue. One by one, he sucks and licks Harry’s elegant fingers clean: messy, exuberant. Just the same way with which he takes his cock into his mouth, as though he is feasting. Harry’s breath catches in his throat as Henry pulls the full length of Harry’s index finger into his mouth, ghosting his teeth over his knuckles and working the base of the digit with his lips. It is exactly like it, exactly as eager and thorough.</p><p>His blood races south as he exhales shakily. “Goodness, it’s warm out this morning,” he stammers, wiggling his slender frame out of his coat. </p><p>“Sure is,” Henry agrees, taking his own coat off. Then, slowly, his waistcoat, then his shirt sleeves. </p><p>“What are you doing? Someone will see!”</p><p>“No one’ll see,” Henry says, bringing his callused fingertips to rest on the buttons of Harry’s waistcoat. “We’re alone here, remember?” </p><p>Harry rests his hands on Henry’s bare waist; it’s warm beneath his palms. Something about the way he says it, a grim edge to his tone, stirs something unwelcome in him, fingers scars not fully healed. A chill trickles down his spine despite the sun on his shoulders and for a moment everything surrounding him, except for Henry himself, feels flat and garishly bright, like painted sets in a play. It is a curious thing that happens sometimes since they’ve been back, this sense that nothing is quite real. <i>Well,</i> he reminds himself, <i>it is not uncommon, remember, for survivors of some trauma, some cataclysmic event, to experience problems, difficulties—in the wake of—</i><br/>
</p><p>
“Are you with me?” Henry asks with a sharp tug to his shirtfront. His eyes are soft with worry.</p><p>Harry’s face crinkles into a soft smile. Anything to keep worry from those eyes. “Always,” he says, tilting his face upward for a kiss. Something pained flits across Henry’s face and for a moment it seems he is about to speak. But instead he lowers his mouth to meet Harry’s.</p><p>Then whatever unearthly chill it was that had moved through him is forgotten in the starved sear of Henry’s mouth. Their tongues grapple slickly in the shared heat of their sealed lips; Harry licks the inside of Henry’s lip and Henry arches his tongue against Harry’s teeth. Soon neither man can tell where his mouth ends and the other’s begins. Their bodies, too, are pressed flush, a line of supple heat from their mouths to their hips. Harry grabs Henry by his seat and yanks him even closer so that his hardened length digs into his hip.</p><p>It still electrifies him to think he makes Henry feels this way. Harry remembers him at the beginning of the expedition, joyful and robust, with an easy warmth that seemed fit to thaw the whole of the pack. Harry remembers the longing, the jealousy, the confusion—how he wished to be the favorite friend of this man with whom he could scarcely claim acquaintanceship. </p><p>And more than that, it was like God Himself had extricated from the labyrinth of Harry’s brain the vision of physical perfection he’d at once cherished and tried to repress all his life. Not woman, as it should’ve been, but man: an exemplar of manhood, in fact. Tall, with a broad, sculpted chest and hard, heavy thighs. A lacework of dark hair across his chest and belly. Harry loved how he loomed, how he seemed to fill whatever room he was in. Harry loved it, and found himself buoyed along some days by a mere clap on the back or a mirthful wink. Other days he was sick with it, miserable and jealous, for Henry meted out his warmth and energy in equal portion to every man he encountered. Harry would never have guessed his feelings were reciprocated.</p><p><i>Yet here we are,</i> he thinks to himself, astonished. <i>After it all.</i> His joy fills and then seems to grow beyond him. He never in his life was permitted such bliss, and now? He breaks the kiss to rest his head against the rough, sweaty bareness of Henry’s chest, listening to the blood borne in and out on a tidal beat synchronized with his own. Louder than the world.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Chapter 2</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Mmm. It doesn’t seem to be particularly tender—would you say it’s here—“ he presses his fingers into where the kneecap joins the bone— “or here that pains you?” Goodsir clasps Collins’ knee on either side with thumb and forefinger, and squeezes.</p><p>“It’s... neither,” Collins exhales after an awkward pause. He’s never been a good liar. “Actually, I...” he recognizes how there is nothing he may say next that is at once true and appropriate, so he says nothing, smiling helplessly. Goodsir smiles back, his brow knit queryingly. “It’s nothing,” Collins finally manages glumly. It’s—fine now.”</p><p>“Your knee, you mean?”</p><p>“My—oh! My knee. Yes. Right as rain now, it seems.” And that was that. He would have to rise, roll down his trouser leg, and leave the sickbay, minus one affected limp. A miracle. If only the good doctor weren’t so inscrutable. Behind a face that seems to run clear as spring water lies something impenetrable. That he’s attracted to him is plain: his hands tremble and his cheeks blaze red each time Collins speaks to him. And he doesn’t know what to do with his eyes. Even now, he’s gazing absently at the musculature of his bare calf; what’s devilish in Collins can’t resist flexing subtly so the hard-hewn muscle lifts, taut and full, in the dim light. Sure enough, Goodsir’s breath quickens almost imperceptibly, and his gaze... deepens, somehow. Rests more heavily. And nothing in the world would be more natural than—if he would just rest his hand on him, not with a physician’s detached briskness but with urgency, with trembling—but, Collins reminds himself, desire is not complicity. If anything, it may well mean only that a man counts himself among those he hates. And that kind of man, Collins knows from experience, is dangerous.</p><p>Better to be patient, to yearn mutely. When the need for another’s touch becomes too acute to bear, Morfin’s always game. They manage in the dark, both transfiguring the other in his mind’s eye into someone else. Morfin has even told him about his man back home—a belligerent shipwright, as like to strike him as embrace him, depending on how much gin is running through him. </p><p>“Doesn’t seem right,” Collins tells him one night. “Being beat so oft.”</p><p>Morfin’s thin lips twist into a rueful smile. “We take what we can get,” he says. “You wait til you’re older and not so comely.”</p><p>“You mean I won’t always be this handsome?” Collins teases.</p><p>“I’m afraid not, lad. Though I never <i>was</i> much what to look at, if I’m honest.” </p><p>Collins eyes Morfin. Beady eyes,  knobby nose, slit mouth. “ ‘s not all looks,” he says.</p><p>Morfin shrugs. “ ‘All cats are the same in the dark,’” he says. “ ‘cept we <i>live</i>, men like us, in the dark. All our days. The quicker you clap onto that, the better.”</p><p>He thinks of this now, trying to decipher Goodsir’s gaze. There really seems to be nothing there but gentleness and lust. So though his visit is seemingly over, he allows the silence to stretch and hum until it resonates like empty air sometimes seems to resonate in the last moments before a church bell rings. The assistant surgeon’s gaze climbs his legs, up the hard curve of his calf and across his powerful thighs; he pauses where his yard lies heavy and just beginning to stir (for there’s nothing so delicious to Collins as being pinned in place by the eyes of another). Then his belly and chest, leaning forward on locked elbows, brawny forearms, his large hands cupped on the table where he sits. </p><p>Goodsir steps closer, just between Collins’ open knees. His gaze comes to rest on his mouth; he lifts his hands—elegant, deft fingers—to Collins’ thighs and rests them there lightly. So tentative is his touch that later, after it all, Collins will never be certain if this first touch was real or if Goodsir’s hands hovered, trembling, without alighting. For self-denial, Collins soon realized—to halt, terrified, at the edge of surrender—that was Harry’s way. It was his habit and his instinct, and might well be his fate. Both their fates, now, at the end of all things.</p><p>Collins wakes in the dark. He can still smell the formaldehyde and candle grease of the sick bay; his body still reverberates with the memory of a touch so phantom it may not have been there at all. He waits. Harry’s body, he knows, lies next to him in the dark—wasted, carved at, all its wondrous planes and nooks anointed with poison. But Harry’s not returned yet: he’s still out wandering the shale, the ice, the vast disordered striation of black sky and bleached land that is his home now. He will drift back eventually, a column of guttering gold light—like flame cut hastily into the shape of a man—and sink into his own body, and together they will dream again of blackberry picking. For the tenth time. The hundredth. The thousandth. </p><p>This is an empty darkness, a yawning darkness, and one is never quite warm here. It stretches on and on, a low-ceilinged void at the diminishing edges of which drift and blink the souls of others: far lights as erratic and dim as firebugs. Morfin visits sometimes, mostly as a disembodied voice. Once or twice, too, Sir John’s orbited near enough to recognize, a bicorne crowning a blazing pillar which performs a grotesque pirouette on its only leg. The apparition smells like tallow, like brass, like fresh ink. And it will vanish eventually like the rest. For he’s seen flames blink out like a blown candle. </p><p><i>What happens when we disappear?</i> he’d asked once.</p><p><i>We stay,</i> Morfin answers him from the dark. <i>Out there. Wandering.</i></p><p>
  <i>Alone?</i>
</p><p><i>No more dreams, if that’s what you’re asking.</i> His bitter laughter rises, rises, flares into a scream like a wounded animal. His head catches and blazes until there’s nothing left to burn. </p><p>—————</p><p>“Don’t—don’t close your eyes, love, look at me. Look at my hand on your prick.”</p><p>It is noon, early in September. Sweltering. But Harry still presses against Henry as Henry works his callused hand, slicked with the evidence of their shared arousal, along Harry’s straining length. Henry’s own cock juts proudly up alongside, a heavy, prominently-ridged curve of pinkish-tan flesh arcing up from its thatch of dark curls. It is Harry’s opinion that that fine tool—an exemplar among all he’s seen, both within and outside of his capacity as a physician—is being unfairly neglected at the moment, but Henry had swatted playfully at him when he’d reached for it. So here he lies, in Henry’s capable hands, falling open at the seams.</p><p>He’d been a quick study, Henry had. Harry hadn’t even been able to tell him what he needed, for before Henry his few encounters with other men had been hasty, impersonal ventures, carried out in the dark. He’d had neither the time nor voice to piece together what it was he wanted, what would please him. But Henry <i>saw </i>him, and wanted nothing more than to bring him peace, pleasure. He’d fit like a skeleton key into a door Harry didn’t even know he kept locked. It was almost possible to forget how wretched, how damning, a sin it was. </p><p>He won’t think of that now. Henry climbs onto him, pressing his thighs together with his own. Now his thick knuckles graze his own shaft with each stroke, causing it to bounce prettily each time. “Do you know, Mr. Goodsir, what I used to think about?” He asks.</p><p>Harry swallows, does not answer: what part of his brain not scrambled by Henry’s deft ministrations is stupefied by the heat. </p><p>“I used to stroke myself,” he continues blithely, “and think of you. It was nearly like a fever. Remember when I made up some clap about my knee, and we nearly kissed, I believe? After that I chapped my prick raw. Because of you.” He changes his angle, draws his grip a little tighter. Harry has no language left, only sensation. His body is a song, a resonating chord. “I thought of...” Henry trails off for a moment as he takes himself in hand also, inhales sharply, and continues. “I thought of—how your cock would feel in my hand. How your face would look. Whether you’d—roll your eyes or close them or, or what. The sounds I could make come out of that mouth.”</p><p>“I hope I’ve lived up—to expectations,” Harry manages, aiming for wit but grateful he’s even managed coherence. </p><p>“Christ, yes. More than.” Henry’s voice is more breath than speech when he’s close, low and raw and punctuated by beautiful little gasps. And the mere act of bringing Harry off draws him tremblingly close, he need hardly even be touched—<i>Christ.</i> Harry looks into Henry’s dark, kind eyes and slides his hand down his forearm, cupping them near his elbow. He can feel Henry’s muscles move beneath his palm, a quick little repeating pulse like the wing beat of a bird, and it is this—the mere physicality of Henry, his proximity and reality, in all his gentleness and brute beauty and wild whims, him, <i>him</i>—that tips Harry over the edge, sends him tumbling into that divine, blazing sweetness, somewhere on the tide of which he gasps Henry’s name as though in prayer and spends against Henry’s cupped palm.</p><p>As the last of his ecstasy ebbs away, he sees that Henry’s slicked his fist with Harry’s seed and is basically fucking himself with it. An indelicate word, but there’s no other for what he’s doing, gasping and racing his fist roughly up and down his shaft. </p><p>“Shh,” Harry says, laying his hand on Henry’s. “Let me help you.”</p><p>Hours later, Harry wakes from dozing—terrible dreams, of which he remembers, blessedly, nothing—to find Henry already awake, studying him. It’s still hot out but Harry nestles in closer. Since they’ve returned from the arctic, there’s this splinter of cold in his chest no amount of heat can drive out. But Henry doesn’t seem to mind. They lie facing one another in the grass, Henry’s leg thrown over Harry’s hip. </p><p>“I am glad that there is time now,” Harry says, tracing a soft path down Henry’s chest with his fingers, “to just... rest together.”</p><p>Henry nods but that familiar pained worry flashes across his eyes yet again. </p><p>“Something’s troubling you,” Harry says. “I wish you’d tell me what.”</p><p>“I... it doesn’t feel like there <i>is</i> time, somehow. I can’t explain it. It’s like—here we are, I should be glad. I know I should.” His voice is plaintive with fear, his eyes wide beneath that dark, heavy brow. “But it feels like everything that happened... Tuunbaq, the carnivale—the  cold, the goddamned cold—it can still find us, somehow. Claim us.”</p><p>As Henry speaks, Harry feels a trap door in the floor of his brain, there where the spine meets the skull, open up; he feels himself tumbling into it, into a chill, yawning blackness. For he has felt the same and would not say it. Could not. Trembling inwardly, he reaches up and combs his fingers through Henry’s hair, pushing it back—how long it’s grown—from that face he shall never, ever tire of. Not in ten lifetimes, a hundred. A thousand.</p><p>“It is not uncommon for survivors of... tragic events, traumas, to have difficulty adjusting. To feel fear at unexpected moments, in circumstances incongruous to feelings of anxiety—I feel it too. But I am certain it is nothing.” He smiles, strokes Henry’s cheek. “Let us be glad,” he says with finality.</p><p>“Glad?” Henry echoes, a trace of bitterness in his voice.</p><p>“Glad,” Harry affirms. “We are home now, Henry. Here, with one another. Home.”</p>
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